October is National Bullying Prevention Month. In hopes for more civility and decency nationwide, among people of ALL ages, I’ll be sharing some key articles, strategies and insights. Please read and share with those who work and live with school-aged kids!

 

Late August and September are the honeymoon season in many schools across the United States; the time of year when students are exploring new friendships, feeling out the shifting social hierarchies of their grade, and determining where they fit in. As a school counselor, I have learned to anticipate that there will be a few rough patches in the early weeks of school as relationships re-shuffle from the previous year, but for the most part, the friendship waters will be steady. Then, there’s October.

It’s no coincidence that National Bullying Prevention month falls at that time of year when select school-aged kids have sized each other up, calculated their relative social power, and begun to stake out their new place in the peer pecking order. In this game of social whack-a-mole where young people put each other down in order to boost themselves up, bullying is often the strategy of choice to “win” the popularity wars. Teaching young people how to recognize bullying in all of its shapes, forms, practices, and methods is the necessary first step to equipping them to manage the highs and lows of their school social scene.

These four categories are a helpful framework to teach young people about purposeful and patterned abuses of social power that tend to peak in schools in the autumn months:

Physical bullying: The traditional “sticks and stones” of aggression, this kind of bullying includes a range of antagonistic behaviors in which one person aims to cause bodily harm to another person.

 

The remainder of this post is available on Psychology Today.  Click below for the direct link or cut and paste the following one in your browser: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/passive-aggressive-diaries/201710/why-october-is-the-busy-season-bullying#_=_

 

Why October is the Busy Season for Bullying Prevention